Standard of Honour. Jack Whyte

in his anger and indignation he had underestimated his opponents, not merely their strength but their number, taking the word of the fugitive at face value. He and his party had ridden into a cleverly constructed ambush in a steep-walled wadi, and he had lost seven of his men, shot down from concealment, before he could even begin to collect himself. Only Sayeed, Arouf, himself and one other had managed to fight their way free, three of them, and two of their mounts, wounded. The fourth man had died of his wounds soon after their escape, as had his horse, and Sayeed had cut the throat of Arouf’s horse some time after that, when the deep slash in its belly had finally split and spread, spilling the beast’s entrails to tangle in its hooves. Arouf, pressing a cloth to his bleeding groin wound, had then mounted behind Sayeed, and the three had kept riding until they found this place, where they had stopped for the night. Sayeed, the only one unhurt among them, had stanched the bleeding in Arouf’s groin first, sprinkling it with some powder that stopped the flow of blood, after which he had strapped the wound up tightly. He had then tended to al-Farouch’s leg, the smaller bone of which had been snapped by a crossbow bolt. He cleaned the wound, set the bone as well as he was able, and then bandaged and splinted the limb, which he expected to heal completely.

      They had spent the night here together, all three of them, and when the next day dawned they discussed what must be done. Their companions would be far ahead of them by now, and might even have stopped to wait for them, or turned back to search for them, but all three men knew that the odds against their being found without assistance left little hope. And so al-Farouch decided that Sayeed would ride out in search of the others. Arouf would have none of that, swearing he was sound enough to ride, now that the bleeding from his groin had stopped. He would ride out with Sayeed, overriding his brother’s wishes for the first time in all the years they had known each other. He would take the northern route while Sayeed searched farther to the east. Al-Farouch, whose splinted leg made it impossible for him to mount a horse, would remain where he was, with a supply of food and water sufficient to sustain him for seven to eight days, by which time one or both of the others would have returned with help. The two then rode off, leaving al-Farouch’s round shield hanging from his upended spear to serve as a sign on their way back.

      “And now you know as much as I do, ferenghi,” al-Farouch concluded, using the Arabic term for a Frank and lapsing back into silence.

      Sinclair sat silent, mulling over what he had been told. If Sayeed had survived the storm and found his fellows, they would return here and that would be the end for him. He could still depart on the horse, he knew; one way or another he could contrive to mount it again, even without a mounting block, now that he knew its placid nature. He thought of looking out again to check that the horse was still nearby, but instead he leaned forward and spoke to the Saracen.

      “How is it that you speak our tongue?”

      “One of your tongues,” the other answered drily. “When you spoke at first, in that first tongue you used, it fell upon my ears like the gibbering of djinns. What was that noise?”

      Sinclair grinned for the first time in days. “That was Gaelic, the language of my people in Scotland, where I was born.”

      “You are not, then, a Frank?”

      “No, I am what they call a Scot, but my family came there from France a hundred years ago. When the call went out for warriors to come here, I joined the army.”

      “Are you a knight, then? I see no badges of rank on you.”

      “I cast them off with my armor when I found myself afoot in the desert. There are too many ways to die out here without being foolish enough to seek one, weighed down with useless steel and heavy clothing.”

      “Ah, I see. Plainly you have been here long enough to learn a smattering of Allah’s wisdom, praise His name…But you came here to kill Saracens, no?”

      “No, not exactly. I came because my duty as a knight summoned me here, to Outremer. Killing or being killed is merely part of the knight’s code.”

      “You are of the Temple, then?”

      Something, some unidentifiable element of menace in the simple question, made Sinclair change the affirmative that sprang to his lips, but he managed to dissemble without either lying or, he thought, betraying himself. “I am a knight,” he drawled. “From Scotland, many days from France by sea. Not all the knights in Outremer are of the Temple or the Hospital.”

      “No, but the Temple djinns are the most dangerous of them all.”

      Sinclair let that statement lie as it fell. “You did not answer my question, about how you came to speak the language of the Franks.”

      “I learned it as a boy, in Ibelin, where I grew up. There was a Frankish lord who built a fortress there, after the capture of Jerusalem, long before I was born. He took the name of the town as his own. I worked there when I was a boy, in the stables, and I ran and played with his son, who was my age. I learned to speak their tongue, as the boy learned mine.”

      Sinclair was frowning. “Ibelin…Mean you Sir Balian of Ibelin? I know him. I rode with him from Nazareth to…” He broke off, aware that he might be saying more than he ought, but al-Farouch was already nodding his head.

      “It would be he. His name in our tongue is Balian ibn Barzan, and he is a powerful man among the ferenghi nowadays—a knight, but not of the Temple.”

      “Are you still friends, then?”

      The Saracen shrugged. “Who can be friends, as Muslim and Christian, in a holy war of jihad? He and I have not met in years, not since we were boys. We might pass each other in the souk and not know it.”

      Sinclair slapped his good hand on his thigh and straightened his back, turning to squint out into the brightness behind him. “We should eat something. All men share that need, even in a jihad, no? When did you last eat?”

      Al-Farouch thought, his lips pursed. “I cannot remember, but it was a long time ago.”

      Sinclair stood up. “I left my horse—your horse—saddled in the sun, and he must be suffering. If I bring him in here, close to you, will you help me to unsaddle him? It’s difficult to loosen a tight girth with one hand.”

      “I will, if you can bring him close enough that I can reach him.”

      A short time later, the horse seen to and its saddlebags removed, Sinclair dropped the saddle to the floor of the little shelter and sat on it while he rummaged in the bag that held the food, withdrawing a large piece of dried meat and the sharp little knife. He threw the meat first and then the knife to the surprised Muslim, who caught it easily, hilt first. “Here, you have two hands and can cut better than I can. Cut us to eat from that, while I see to the rest.”

      The Muslim set to slicing the hard meat without comment, while Sinclair extracted dried figs, dates, and bread from the saddlebag for both of them.

      They ate in a courteous, strangely companionable silence, each immersed in his own thoughts. Sinclair reflected upon the unlikelihood of the circumstances that had brought him to this point, placidly sharing a meal with an enemy who, under any other conditions, he would have attempted to kill on sight. He wondered if his silent companion might be thinking the same thing, but then his thoughts returned to the veiled threat he had suspected in the Saracen’s question about the Templars, and he began to take solemn stock of it.

      Sinclair had no means of knowing whether his cautious response had been any more necessary than his decision to conceal his knowledge of Arabic, but he felt comfortable with the way he had deflected al-Farouch’s curiosity. He was indeed a Temple Knight, and he suspected that the Saracen would have accorded him little in the way of approval for that, but there was much more to Sir Alexander Sinclair than mere membership in the Order of the Temple, and he had good reason to be reticent about who he was.

      Sinclair was a highly placed member of the clandestine Brotherhood of Sion, the secret society within the Temple that had founded and created the Order for its own ends, decades earlier at the turn of the century, and which still supervised and guided the Order’s policies.